Improving the Measurement of Moral Judgment

• In Event: Moral Concerns and Political Behavior: New Approaches

Abstract

Political debates are fundamentally debates about morality. Moral views are often taken as causally prior to political attitudes because morality is a fundamental aspect of day-to-day social life that requires little political knowledge or sophistication. Existing findings hinge on the assumption that we have adequately measured moral views. Scholars have developed a variety of measures, but nearly all consist of a series of abstract statements. This common measurement approach faces a number of serious challenges. First, each moral value is typically measured in isolation. Yet, in practice, moral and political decisions involve tradeoffs between competing considerations. Second, the ambiguity of the items is a likely source of measurement error. For example, liberals and conservatives might agree about the importance of “justice,” but disagree about what that term means. These ambiguities threaten to undermine the stability and validity of these measures. In this paper, we develop and validate a new measure of moral values that aims to solve many of these problems. Our measure consists of a large number of moral dilemmas that force respondents to choose between competing concerns, including different moral values and personal self-interest. As a result, our measure provides information about how respondents weigh these concerns against each other. Additionally, our dilemmas consist of concrete, day-to-day choices, rather than abstract judgments. This design choice minimizes the chance that respondents interpret the questions in different ways. We test the validity of our measures by evaluating understanding of the scenarios, internal consistency, temporal stability, and associations with existing measures.

Author

• Scott Clifford, University of Houston